Recommended Reading

Hi everyone! This is an extra huge edition of the Rec Reading, because it’s my last one for this particular RR stint. I hope you’ve all found something interesting, enjoyable, or useful out of my roundups over the past couple of months. ~L

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Young playwright Kelly Vincent has stepped up to be the main candidate for Dignity for Disability in the South Australian state election, after the death of the party’s founder. […]

“To step up to this new position is a great honour to me,” Ms Vincent says. “I’m running to improve the situation [for the] one in five disabled Australians.” Ms Vincent says the situation for disabled people is ‘dire’, and that she’s faced many challenges in her day-to-day life.

“I’m currently sitting in a wheelchair I’ve had for four months, but it took two years to get,” she says. “Prior to that I was using the same wheelchair from the age of ten to 21, so you can imagine the physical pain and discomfort that I was having because of that, and the loss of independence. So I learnt a lot in that experience, in battling for that chair.”

As well as issues with obtaining basic equipment, the candidate says disabled South Australians face issues with finding suitable housing and care, and find it difficult or prohibitively expensive to travel from place to place.

I’ve been thinking about disability a lot lately. Dancing around the word itself, never quite daring to apply the word to me. Never quite daring to dip more than a toe into the water, so to speak. I’ll use the word indirectly, by tagging a post with ‘hidden disabilities’ or by saying ‘I feel disabled by X, Y and sometimes Z’, but that’s about as far as I’ve gone–and even that fills me with doubt as to whether I have the right to use these terms.

Nearly five times as many men are competing at the 2010 Games. It’s skewed by sledge hockey, which is a male-only event. But subtract the 118 hockey players from the 506 competitors and women are still outnumbered by more than three to one. […]

Even in Canada, women with disabilities are among the poorest in the country and even without needing customized and specialized equipment, sports are expensive.

But there’s also self-selection. Women generally don’t participate in sports in as large numbers as men. They also are less likely to engage in risky behaviours and, as a result, fewer disabled women acquire their injuries. Qualtrough says most women are either born with disabilities or have had cancers that required amputations. Plus, there’s the whole issue of children and families.

So yes, it’s still March, which means that it’s still Endometriosis Awareness Month. And talking with some of the members over at Live Journal’s endometriosis community brought to light how much the lack of information and lack of accurate information can make dealing with endo harder for some of us.

These misconceptions are harmful, since they can contribute to stigma associated with chronic pain and make it more difficult for people to seek out and receive proper treatment:

In order to ensure the rights of people with disabilities, there is a need for a national advisor on the subject to the prime minister, former chief justice of the Delhi High Court Ajit Prakash Shah said Thursday.

“There is a need for a national advisor on disability to the prime minister, as it will help in bridging the gap between policies and ground realities,” Shah said at the inauguration of a two-day meet on the disability sector in the capital.

The father of a South End quadriplegic who died in 2007 after his wheelchair malfunctioned during a repair session said yesterday a $10 million lawsuit against the company is about fair treatment for the disabled.

“It’s infuriating,” said Charlie Thompson, whose son Jeffrey, 29, died a day after his wheelchair malfunctioned while two technicians from Franklin, Tenn.-based National Seating & Mobility were doing routine repairs.

The parents of a 12-year-old boy with learning disabilities say they have been forced to educate their son at home because the education authority will not pay the £12-a-day taxi fare to get him to school. […] Lee used to get the bus from outside his house to the school gates but when the route was discontinued and replaced by a school loop bus, Lee twice became confused and ended up lost in the town centre.

Lee’s mum, Mrs Godden, said […] “The education department know that my own disability also prevents me from taking Lee to school myself so I am at my wits’ end about what to do.”

The Immigration Department has refused to grant a skilled worker’s visa to a highly qualified social worker from India because she is legally blind. Simran Kaur, 29, came to Melbourne in 2007 on a student visa with her husband, Jasmeet Singh. She had obtained a master’s degree in social work in India and completed a diploma in community welfare and development here last year. […]

The [Commonwealth medical] officer said she met the criteria for legal blindness and she would be eligible for the blind or disability pension ”in due course”. ”Such a person with this condition and severity, staying for the proposed duration of stay (permanent), would likely require the … blind or disability pension. This would result in significant cost to the Australian community,” the officer wrote.

“Chicago is so progressive,” says [Carrie] Sandahl, 41, an advocate for disability rights who has become a leading researcher on disability and the arts. She arrived last fall from Florida State University in Tallahassee to head a new program at the University of Illinois at Chicago called the Program on Disability Art, Culture, and Humanities. The curriculum is devoted to research of and the creation of disability art.

I am just stunned about the young man who died in the wheelchair because he was still sitting in while it was being worked on. What on earth were the repair workers thinking?! If I take my car into the shop, they don’t let me sit in it while they work on it. If I take a bicycle to the shop, they don’t attempt to make repairs while I’m sitting on it. I mean, what on earth? Were they *that* unable to separate a person from the wheelchair they use?

Kowalski: Anna put a huge amount of work into the Rec Reading before I took my turn. It will appear again, but I can’t give you a date and time this minute. *cue Battlestar Galactica quote*

Everyone else: thanks for all the thanks! Rec Reading, perhaps by its nature, rarely gets a “good post” or a “thanks” despite being the result of a metric fuckton of work every day; it’s nice to hear that you enjoyed it 🙂

I very much appreciate your work on these posts so I (and everyone else) can read (at least some of) the links and know what’s going on where and see interesting stuff I probably wouldn’t have found on my own (or at least part of it, it’s a big world).

Thank you so much for including information about Endometriosis Awareness Month!! 🙂

I have lived with endometriosis for 28 of my 41 years. It is a serious condition that desperately needs more awareness! Sadly, endometrosis misinformation in the media is very common. We are working to change that. If anyone is interested in signing our endometriosis awareness petition, the link for it is located on my blog. (I won’t leave the link here because I don’t want to appear spammy).